The World of Homer
which reach us in Greek books vary enormously, as Pausanias says, from
each other, and are no more historical than the Irish legends of the
migrations of the Scots from Scythia to Scotland by way of Athens,
Egypt, and Spain. My sole object is to make intelligible the version
of their own origin which the Athenians and Ionians offered, and to
show that they did, in some moods, draw a distinction between their own
ancestors and Homer's Hellenes and Achaeans. There _was_ a distinction,
in tradition, religion, rites, and customs, but there may have been no
great difference in blood and language.
One thing, then, is certain, the Athenians and Ionians admitted that
they were Hellenic in race and speech merely through slight contact
with Achaeans. Attica was never "Achaeanised" in religion, burial
rites, and other ritual. Attica was never conquered by Achaeans, she
stood apart. Now this claim to be a region apart, conquered neither
by Achaeans nor Dorians, is certainly supported by the fact that the
traditions and legends of Attica stand widely remote in all respects
from the ancient Achaean legends in Homer, and in Theban and Minyan and
Aetolian "saga," or bardic traditions.[2] The traditions of the Ionians
in Asia, again, are connected with those of Attica rather than with the
Achaean saga, although the Ionians of Asia were not, and were known not
to be, by any means of solely Attic descent. This is confessed.
Returning to the Ionians of Asia, and their account of themselves given
in the time of Herodotus, we find that it agrees with the fabulous
genealogies already studied. The Ionians claimed to have in-habited
twelve cities of what, in the time of Herodotus, was called "Achaia,"
the _Aigialos_ in the northern Peloponnese;--that they were driven
thence to Attica by Achaeans, fugitives from the Dorians in other parts
of Peloponnese, is asserted by Herodotus. Ionians were also, of old,
_in Boeotia_, neighbours of the "Cadmeians," and some of the Cadmeians
were admitted, on conditions, to Athenian citizenship.[3]
It thus appears that the people later called, in Asia, "Ionians," had
been dwellers on the coasts of Boeotia and Attica, as well as on the
northern Peloponnese. That they were then and there known as "Ionians"
it would be difficult to prove. Homer has nothing to say of the Ionians
as a peculiar people in the Peloponnesus or Boeotia. Of their twelve
Peloponnesian cities, the Catalogue gives Orneai, Pellênê, Aigeira, and
Helikê to Agamemnon.[4]
If Homer really knew any people called Ionians at all, they were
Athenian. Meanwhile the people of the Ionian name in Asia were,
according to Herodotus, "a mixed multitude," including members of the
communities known to Homer as Abantes of Euboea, with forty ships,
Phocians, even Arcadians, Cretans, and many others. All these could
only be lumped together as "Ionians" after their settlement in Asia,
and their alliance with the Ionian colonists from Attica.
If the so-called Ionian emigrants were thus mixed, and if some of
them possessed Achaean lays or legends, and at first practised only
the rites mentioned by Homer, such as cremation and cairn-burial, it
would appear that the pre-Hellenic element among these settlers in
Asia overpowered the other elements, or that the Cyclic poets of Ionia
were mainly of pre-Hellenic origin. Their poems, at all events, are
in harmony with Attic ideas and usages, not with Homer's statements:
and, as we shall show, the Ionian poets cannot have tampered much with
our Homer, for the two Epics never admit the Ionian manners which
are copiously illustrated by the Ionian poets of the Trojan war, the
Cyclics.
According to Thucydides as well as Herodotus, the so-called Ionian
migration was a movement of mixed peoples. The leading men of various
Achaean regions had found an asylum in Attica during the troubles
caused by the Dorian incursions, and "so greatly increased the number
of inhabitants that Attica became incapable of containing them, and was
at last obliged to send colonies to Ionia."[5]
We are thus on almost historic ground when we believe that the settlers
in Ionia, though their tendency was to claim Athenian connections, were
"a mixed multitude" from many States, mainly of the seacoasts; and it
is natural to suppose that they intermarried with Carians at Miletus,
as Herodotus says that they also did with Lycians, and other Asiatic
civilised peoples. Though alien religions might be accepted by the
settlers, these beliefs would be Hellenised, as usual; and the Olympian
Poseidon, the Homeric sea-god, patronised the Ionian league of cities.
We really have no historical evidence for the earliest conditions of
Ionian life in Asia. Mr. Murray supposes the early settlers to have
lost all "tribal obligations," all "old laws," and even "household
and family life." "It looks as if the ancestors of the Ionians had in
the extreme stress of their migrations lost hold upon their Achaean
traditions." But the Ionians had no _Achaean_ traditions to lose! They
built walls to their new cities, and inside the wall a man "could take
breath. He could become for a time a man again, instead of a frightened
beast." A terrible picture is drawn of the sufferings and ferocious
cruelties of the invaders, who, however, remain orthodox in religion
after all, and confident in "the manifest help of Zeus and Apollo."[6]
This is not the condition of frightened beasts. In fact, they were not
in that terror-stricken condition when they were able to build walls.
No doubt there was a great deal of rough work; though, as shall be
shown, judging from the art of the Dipylon, the Attic colonists were
highly civilised men, with large ships, and everything handsome about
them, who could make well-organised short voyages, with abundance of
stores. Nor, when they landed, were they, like the early Puritans of
New England, in a country of naked savages. Lycians and Carians, in
Homer, are as much civilised as the Achaeans: a Carian woman was not a
bloodthirsty squaw.
It is not to late legends, but to archaeology, that we must look for
information: "on archaeology fell, and falls, the burden of proof in
this inquiry."[7]
First, as to the culture of the mainland which the colonists left;
we do know through excavations at Sparta something about _Dorian_
civilisation there as early as the ninth century B.C., and it is
probable that the Ionians in Europe were rather in advance of than
behind the contemporary Dorians in the arts of life. The precinct of
Artemis Orthia at Sparta has been excavated, and yields "remains of a
temple in crude brick with wooden frame-work ... this structure the
discoverers" (members of the British School of Athens) "refer to the
ninth century B.C." A similar temple "has appeared also in Hellenic
Asia, at Neandria in the Aeolic Troad."
Near the Orthian temple was "a great Altar of Sacrifice, whose
orientation was the same."[8]
Homer's men, we saw, usually sacrifice hecatombs outside of the temple,
though twelve kine are sacrificed _in_ the temple of the Trojan Athena.
The votive objects found in this Spartan precinct of the ninth century
were pottery in the Geometric, post-Aegean style, with ivory plaques,
at least as large as an ordinary playing card, covering the safety pin
of the _fibula_. The earliest designs incised on these plaques of ivory
"repeat in more than one case Aegean motives" (such as the goddess
holding a bird in each hand); the style is touched with Mesopotamian
influences, but more deeply by the art of the Bronze Age in the area
of the Danube. The "double coil" or "pair of spectacles" shape of
fibula-cover, familiar in the Danubian region, also occurs.[9]
Such being the art in the new home of the Dorian invaders, we expect
to find art rather better than worse among the Ionians at Attica at
the same period--the ninth century B.C., which is doubtless much later
than the central period of the Ionian migration to Asia. The tombs of
Spata in Attica, and the treasure from Aegina in the British Museum,
are taken as relics of the late "Sub-Aegean" art of, say, the tenth
to ninth centuries. The ivories of Sparta "suggest some art of West
Asia": the Aegina objects in gold are partly "Aegean" survivals, partly
show unmistakable Egyptian influence passed through an Oriental medium.
The well-known gold cup of Aegina, with its rosette and four spirals,
has a parallel from one of the rich royal tombs of the Mycenaean
acropolis: there are also, as at Mycenae, many thin round plaques of
gold, probably sewn originally on robes. The rings bear no signets: one
is in the form of a buckler, like a reduced Mycenaean figure-of-eight
shield, inlaid with blue glass paste. The figure of a man or god
holding a water-fowl in each hand, and wearing a loin-cloth, is of a
modified Egyptian character. The date of the objects is placed between
the tenth and ninth centuries.[10]
Probably the Ionian emigrants from the mainland near Aegina left behind
them some, and probably they took with them other craftsmen capable of
executing such work in gold as we have described. But they also left
in Attica the potters who, about the ninth to eighth centuries, B.C.,
covered the great vases, which did duty for headstones in the cemetery
of the Dipylon, with geometric ornament and barbaric representations of
life. It was no barbarian life that they knew, crudely as they designed
it. The people of Athens, as the vases prove, had four-horse chariots;
had large ships manned by many oarsmen, and furnished with a submerged
sharp ram. The warriors in the chariots wore shields slung by baldrics:
in form they were circular, in other cases they exaggerated, in much
smaller dimensions, the features of the Aegean figure-of-eight shield,
or were smaller forms of the Aegean oblong shield. Here and there a
spearman holds in front of him an oval shield _by the handle_. The
swords are straight short swords, worn at right angles to the waist,
not heavy Homeric swords, slung by a baldric from the shoulder. In
some cases, however, heavy leaf-shaped blades are used, both for cut
and thrust.
The people had great spectacular funerals. The body of the dead lay
on a bier in the house, while men, women, and children, mere skeleton
figures, plucked out their hair with both hands. Then the body was
borne in a chariot to the grave (it was seldom cremated), and a
procession of charioteers followed.
The swords and spears were of iron, none had richly adorned hilts of
ivory and gold.
The gold work of the period, chiefly stamped on thin bands, was not
quite so crude as that of the potter with his triangle reversed for a
body, the monstrous thighs and calves of his men, their bird-shaped
inhuman faces,--all of them remote from the Aegean art, and apparently
of northern origin. The artists in gold work were in advance of the
vase-painters, whose horses usually have a thing like a fish for head,
set on a neck like a serpent.
The Attic region, towards the end of the Ionian migration, thus
presents the decay of Aegean and the bloom of geometric decoration, and
of barbaric, probably northern design. None the less the life depicted
so barbarously was no barbaric life. Bad as is the art, you see that
the life is Hellenic.
At the same time the Dipylon life is wholly un-Homeric. The manner of
burial, the huge vases in place of the cairn and pillar, the metal of
the weapons, iron, their want of adornment, the size, shape, and mode
of carrying the sword, the tearing out of their own hair by mourners,
the size of the shields, and even the dress of the women who, in my
opinion, wear skirts, not chitons, are all of a nature unknown to the
Epics. Poets of the Dipylon age could never have preserved the uniform
Homeric descriptions of details totally unlike what they saw in actual